~ Waking Up for the First Time

Chapter 4, part 2: Dominion and Helping our Fathers

Thought the nightmarish Chapter 4 was over? Nope, there’s so much more (pun intended).

The Botkins have established (albeit, unconvincingly) that a woman, whether married or single, is to be a helpmeet. Now, they begin discussing Dominionism, God’s plan for the world, and how girls are to help their fathers in their vision. Girls are not to have their own visions. They are simply to accept their father’s vision.

And how are girls to do this? According to the Botkins: “We show our fathers that we love them by giving them our hearts. A girl turns her heart to her father by caring about what he loves, learning about what is important to him, desiring and seeking his counsel and approval, caring more for his opinion than that of her peers, serving him, helping him, sharing his vision, letting him know her heart” (40).

Okay, so first, get it into your head that your heart doesn’t belong to you. Secondly, forget about learning to love what God loves and forget learning about to love Jesus because you must only care about your earthly father. Thirdly, your peers are kind of useless and will probably just lead you astray so you shouldn’t really care too much what they think. (Might I add that it’s probably safer to just not have friends anyways).

In other words, let’s raise a whole generation of women who don’t have to think for themselves, tell them their only worth is in serving a man, and then tell them that their only purpose is to have as many children as possible to further the “Kingdom.”

Am I making this s***up? I only wish I were.

One girl says, “I thought I loved my father before, but it was for selfish reasons. He was just my dad. But now he is my father, my friend, my guardian, my priest, and my knight in shining armor” (40).

Loving your father just because he’s your dad isn’t enough now? And fathers our are priests? I don’t have a problem a “priest,” but there’s a big difference between someone who has been trained and studied theology, versus a father who does not have to have said training and then has absolute power over his daughter. In a church setting, you do not have to follow a priest if you feel God is telling you something different or if you decide the priest is a bit wonky. In the Botkins setting, your father IS God to you and you have no such options.

Like I said before, the Botkins are simply replacing the approval of one man in a girls life (for instance a boyfriend or a friend) for another—her father. A girl is always dependent on this, they say. A girl cannot have worth apart from a man, because she was made FOR man.

“As we stated before, every woman is, by nature, a man’s helper. You are a helper, no matter what your age or marital status. The choice before you and ever other young woman isn’t ‘to help or not to help?’ It’s whom to help” (42).

So the choice is before you: are you going to be a good, godly daughter and be a helpmeet to your father?

Rebekah says, “It is my duty as a girl and as a daughter to seek out what pleases him [her father], and what makes him strong in his vision, so that I too can embrace his vision and make his passions my passions. My position as a daughter is to be feminine and content with whatever my father does, and in being feminine, I can help my father in his masculinity and can give him confidence by being confident in whatever he says or does” (42).

Rebekah feels that if she doesn’t embrace her father’s vision and agree with him 100%, he will feel less masculine. What, exactly, does that say about a person’s confidence and ego complex that people can’t even disagree with them without making them feel inferior?

The Botkins spend the rest of the chapter talking about Dominism, and daughters helping advance their father’s vision by asking them what they need help with and other things. For a good overview of Dominism, I’d suggest reading this post. In short, dominism is kind of scary.

The Botkins continue the chapter by talking about how girls are their daddies helpmeets. It’s pretty disturbing.

But not as disturbing as this quote.

Ready?

“The job of Christians is to teach all the nations and peoples to obey God, to bring all the earth into complete subjection to Christ. This means that Christians have to do more than just evangelize all nations, but teach them all to observe all that God commands and to live in complete, perfect conformity to His pattern for mankind. And we’re not only to convert natives and savages to this, but also kings, fashion designers, film makers, newspaper reporters, businessmen—all mankind!” (45)

Who are these men who want their daughters acting like this? My dad wouldn’t have wanted me hanging around him asking how I could help him to this degree. It’s one thing to pitch in and help with the work of the family. It’s quite another to become this junior wife (er, helpmeet).

I notice they throw in “and your mother of course” for some kind of good measure. But why make this such a father/daughter thing? Why isn’t this a “kids, pitch in and help your parents so you can be a team until it’s time for you to grow and start your own life” kind of message? I do think kids in our society are too selfish and we have lost a sense of family purpose. But let’s talk about how we can build teamwork in our families, not turn this into some kind of yucky bizzaro thing almost entirely between fathers and daughters.

I had to take breaks. This was not ideal for me. Why was this published? I mean I know why it was published but, I am actually a little tipsy and FURIOUS WITH EVERYTHING (I have created an acronym! CPB! Christian Patriarchal Bulls***! I am using it now.) that CPB is touching and I want them to STOP and GO AWAY and STOOOOOP

seriously. “savages”?!!?!? WHAT EDITOR LOOKED AT THAT AND OKAYED IT

WHAT BETA READER SAW THAT AND WAS OKAY WITH IT

WHAT PART OF ANY OF THIS GOT PAST ANYONE EVER JUST oh god the TEARS WHY

Kate I am not handling this well. no no no no no not well at all. *builds a pillow fort* :(

I think the slimiest part for me was where daughters are responsible for their daddies feeling masculine. It’s psychology 101 that it screws kids up to make them be the adults in the family.
Also I’m pretty sure my dad would have pulled me aside and expressed grave concern for what he’s doing wrong if I exhibited signs that I wanted to adopt his passions and not explore my own. It’s a sick father who wants their child to sacrifice their future so that his ego can be stroked. This Botkin guy must be mentally ill, and I’m not joking.

Oh my word, I just ran across a term for this whole concept in a magazine article. It’s in an article about workaholism in The Atlantic, Sept. 2013 addition, p 19. The term is “Parentification.” It says that it’s a term family therapists use for sons and daughters who “are parents to their own parents and sacrifice their own needs … to accommodate and care for the emotional needs and pursuits of parents or another family member.” The article has cites Carroll and Robinson, “Depression and Parentification Among Adults as Related to Parental Workaholisms and Alcoholism” The Family Journal, Oc. 2000.

Now, I realize this is something akin to “enabling” that family members do when they’re dealing with alchoholics. But how is what Mr. Botkins has taught his daughters not like an alcoholic actively teaching his family to be enablers? I think enablers (including family members of workaholics, I’m betting) usually come to these behaviors unintentionally, with no one teaching anyone the “virtues” of being an enabler. It’s just a survival tactic. Or a codependency that develops. But it’s not healthy. Therapists have a name for it! Can we imagine a book written by the children of a raging alcoholic teaching other children how to enable the alcoholism and how to “parentify” themselves? I think everyone, including Christians, would recognize the craziness of such a thing. How is the Botkins book any different? The father may not have the “sin” of alcoholism, but the daughters are promoting the very “bad behavior” that can accompany it. And of course if we’ve looked up the father’s profile, we see that he has serious issues that likely parallel alcoholism/workaholism, at least in how his behavior might affect his family.

Just because they’re promoting Parentification doesn’t mean it’s not a sickness.

This also gets at something else that’s been in the back of my mind. Mr. Botkins is living the kind of life where there is something for his daughters to join up with a promote. Does the average dad really have such a cause? I’m sure it’s exciting for them to join in in his real life business. How exciting and fulfilling would it be for most daughters to make their lives about, I don’t know, the factory work their dad does and the lawn he mows on the weekend? I think this whole mindset of Parentification they promote requires dads who tend to have the workaholic lifestyle.

I know I’m posting this very late in the week, so I might mention this again when commenting in a more timely fashion.